這問題Simon等人數十年前就討論過

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: July 25, 2009

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

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Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.

The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?

Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.

The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.

“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

Ken Conley/Willow Garage

Herbert Simon From Economist.com

Guru

Herbert Simon

Mar 20th 2009
From Economist.com

Herbert Simon (1916-2001) is most famous for what is known to economists as the theory of bounded rationality, a theory about economic decision-making that Simon himself preferred to call “satisficing”, a combination of two words: “satisfy” and “suffice”. Contrary to the tenets of classical economics, Simon maintained that individuals do not seek to maximise their benefit from a particular course of action (since they cannot assimilate and digest all the information that would be needed to do such a thing). Not only can they not get access to all the information required, but even if they could, their minds would be unable to process it properly. The human mind necessarily restricts itself. It is, as Simon put it, bounded by “cognitive limits”.

Hence people, in many different situations, seek something that is “good enough”, something that is satisfactory. Humans, for example, when in shopping mode, aspire to something that they find acceptable, although that may not necessarily be optimal. They look through things in sequence and when they come across an item that meets their aspiration level they go for it. This real-world behaviour is what Simon called satisficing.

He applied the idea to organisations as well as to individuals. Managers do much the same thing as shoppers in a mall. “Whereas economic man maximises, selects the best alternative from among all those available to him,” he wrote, “his cousin, administrative man, satisfices, looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or ‘good enough’.” He went on to say: “Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought.”

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The principle of satisficing can also be applied to events such as filling in questionnaires. Respondents often choose satisfactory answers rather than searching for an optimum answer. Satisficing of this kind can dramatically distort the traditional statistical methods of market research.

Simon, born and raised in Milwaukee, studied economics at the University of Chicago. “My career,” he said, “was settled at least as much by drift as by choice”, an undergraduate field study developing what became his main field of interest—decision-making within organisations. In 1949 he moved to Pittsburgh to help set up a new graduate school of industrial administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He said that his work had two guiding principles: one was the “hardening of the social sciences”; and the other was to bring about closer co-operation between natural sciences and social sciences.

Simon was a man of wide interests. He played the piano well—his mother was an accomplished pianist—and he was also a keen mountain climber. At one time he even taught an undergraduate course on the French Revolution. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1978, to considerable surprise, since by then he had not taught economics for two decades.

Notable publications

With March, J.G., “Organisations”, John Wiley & Sons, 1958; 2nd edn, Blackwell, 1993

“Administrative Behaviour: A Study of the Decision Making Processes in Administrative Organisation”, The Macmillan Co, New York, 1948; 4th edn, Free Press, 1997

Guru

James March

Jul 24th 2009
From Economist.com

James March (born c 1928) is the gurus’ guru, a man who once came second in just such a poll to the incomparable Peter Drucker (Harvard Business Review, December 2003; see article). An unostentatious academic who spent most of his life on the faculty of Stanford University, described by Harvard Business Review as “a polymath whose career has encompassed numerous disciplines … he has taught courses on subjects as diverse as organisational psychology, behavioural economics, leadership, rules for killing people, friendship, decision-making, models in social science, revolutions, computer simulation and statistics”. A polymath indeed.

He is best known for his work on the behavioural theory of organisations, working at one time with Herbert Simon (see article), the definer of the idea of satisficing, with whom he wrote a classic book, “Organisations”. In this, and in the book he wrote with Richard Cyert, he developed a theory about the “boundedness” of managers’ behaviour. Just as consumers go for the satisfactory rather than the “best” decision when purchasing, so managers go for the less-than-rational decision when on the job, because they are necessarily restricted by human and organisational limitations.

The protections for the imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organisations are disastrous.

In a more recent paper, which he entitled “The Hot Stove Effect”, after Mark Twain’s point that cats who learn to avoid hot stoves learn to avoid cold ones too, March warned that the way in which we learn to reproduce success results, inevitably, in a bias against both risky and novel alternatives.

John Padgett, a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in the journal Contemporary Sociology that “Jim March is to organisation theory what Miles Davis is to jazz … March’s influence, unlike that of any of his peers, is not limited to any possible subset of the social science disciplines; it is pervasive”.

March has also written seven books of poetry and made a film (called “Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership”). His background notes to the film include a short prose poem:

Quixote reminds us
That if we trust only when
Trust is warranted, love only
When love is returned, learn
Only when learning is valuable,
We abandon an essential feature of our humanness.

His love of language has led him to create some colourful metaphors—the garbage-can theory of organisational choice, for instance, which defines an organisation as “a collection of choices looking for problems; issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired; solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer; and decision-makers looking for work”. Problems and solutions flow in and out of the garbage can. Which problems get attached to which solutions is largely a matter of chance.

Notable publications

With Simon, H., “Organisations”, John Wiley & Sons, 1958; 2nd edn, Blackwell, 1993

With Cyert, R., “A Behavioural Theory of the Firm”, Prentice Hall 1963; 2nd edn, Blackwell Business, 1992

“A Primer on Decision Making”, Free Press, New York, and Maxwell Macmillan International, Oxford, 1994

“The Pursuit of Organisational Intelligence”, Blackwell, 1999

More management gurus

This profile is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on more than 50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers past and present and over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.

基于实践的微观经济学 1996

基于实践的微观经济学 1996

作者：[美]赫伯特•西蒙 著
译者：孙涤 译
出版时间：2009年4月第1版
开本：32开
定价：15.00元
ISBN：978-7-5432-1577-1
出版者：格致出版社

内容简介

　　本书是诺贝尔经济学奖获得者赫伯特•西蒙晚年在意大利客座时三次演讲的汇集，分别围绕有限理性、企业组织理论、经济学理论的实证检验三个问题，厚积薄发、深入浅出地检讨了经济学中不少有争议的方法论和价值论问题。

　　读来尤为过瘾的是，作为一个执着探索的学者和斗士，西蒙曾频频投入其中不少的关键论战，舌战群儒应答经济学家对其人性假设的质疑。智慧的火花、犀利的比喻在书中俯拾皆是，读来脍炙人口。

　　书的最后附有西蒙的自传，细数了西蒙如何走上治学道路，对于研究西蒙的个人成长和学术成就都有重要的帮助。

作者简介

　　赫伯特•西蒙，1978年诺贝尔经济学奖获得者。其主要学术贡献包括有限理性理论和组织决策理论。其主要著作有： 《行政管理行为》（1945）、 《人类模型》（1957）、 《组织》（1958）、《管理决策的新科学》（1960）、 《发明的模型》（1977）、《思想模型》（1979年）。　
西蒙学养精深，研究所涉从心理学、经济学、政治学、行政学到生物学、统计计量学、管 理学、运筹学，乃至物理学、力学和计算机科学，无不建树颇丰。除了诺贝尔经济学奖（1978 年）外，他又获得过计算机界的最高奖——图林奖（1975），管理科学的最高奖——冯•纽曼奖（1988），美国政治学的最高奖——麦迪森奖 （1983），以及难以胜数的其他奖项。众多的领域凡经他的研究涉及的，皆能臻于至境。

目录

译者序
前言

讲演一 决策中的理性
1. 理性概念的进展；
2. 当代选择理论；
3. 理性的多元性；
4. 历史回顾；
5. 理论的实证检验。
参考文献
讲演一的讨论

演讲二 组织在经济中的角色
1. 组织与市场;
2. 利他主义和组织认同;
3. 组织、管理和经济;
4. 结论
参考文献
讲演二的讨论

讲演三 经济学的实证根据
1．理论怎样才算具体？
2．数据对理论的作用;
3．经济过程的数据来源;
4．在工商企业之外寻找实证数据;
5. 企业的的决策：案例研究;
6．经济史;
7．“应用”经济学的数据;
8．调查技术;
9．结论
参考文献
讲演三的讨论

赫伯特•西蒙的自传

代译序

贤哲西蒙

　　西蒙教授于2001年二月九日逝世，享年八十四岁。这当然是研究学界的一大损失。在他的追悼会上，保罗.萨缪尔逊说 西蒙是他所遇到过的人当中最为睿智者，肯定不是应景的谀词；而经济教科书上常称西蒙是经济学家之中的经济学家，亦非溢美的褒奖。 然而国内新闻传媒对他的逝世却鲜少报导，重视程度尚不及一个三流明星。自然啦，要把西蒙教授的贡献同赚钱致富能扯上一点关系的话， 即使说是间接的都还嫌勉强呢。 不过他的影响之深远，尤其在阐述人类做选择的动机、限度、过程、和评价方面的里程碑贡献，依笔者愚见，确实是出乎其类而拔乎其粹的。

　　西蒙的广博可从他的研究范围得到佐证， 从心理学、经济学、政治学、行政学到生物学，统计计量学、管理学、运筹学、乃至物理学、力学和计算机科学，他无不建树宏富。仅从他在卡内基.梅隆大学的网页（www.psy.cmu.edu/psy/faculty/hsimon） 上所列出的发表了的研究成果就有千种之多。 至于他研究的精深，亦可从所获得的奖项略见一斑。除了诺贝尔经济奖（1978年）外，他又获得过计算机界的最高奖--图林奖（1975），管理科学的最高 奖——冯.纽曼奖（1988），美国政治学的最高奖--麦迪森奖（1983），以及难以胜数的其他奖项。众多的领域凡经他的研究涉及到的，皆能臻于绝境。 这种智慧，这类点石成金的功力, 即使不说“绝后”，至少可在“空前”之畴。

　　在诸多的社会学科中， 经济学勉强能挤入科学之亚流，算是个例外。以方法论，经济学奋力沿用并融合自然科学及数学的成果，称得上谨严；然而就对象论，经济学所不得不面对其所处理 的对象——人的行为的变异性，而使物理科学方法的逻辑分析每有捉襟见肘的缺憾。大哲学家伯特兰.罗素曾声称经济学太容易, 他不屑于去深究；大物理学家马克.普郎克却承认经济学太艰难, 故不敢去涉猎。两位贤哲大概都不会讳认经济学的晦涩吧。

　　西蒙早期的训练是行政管理。对公共决策过程的切近观察，使他感悟到人群和个人行为的独特逻辑和外在的物理环境是大不 相同的， 这也许能帮助解释，为什么西蒙对经济学的研究打一开始就不入主流的原因。 从1940年代起， 西蒙着重研究人类知性行为的因果秩序，极具原创性。他的研究成果，也是他的博士论文，总结成《管理行为》（Administrative Behavior）一书，于1947年问世。该书堪称经典，历久弥新地成为众多管理理念的前导和研究方法的源头。在1997年第四版的导言里，西蒙明确表 示，原书的结论在五十年里并没有大的变动，大部分的内容还值得保留。通讯和信息处理技术的进步影响了人们的社会实践和社会价值观，改变着管理和决策过程， 但是人类组织四千年来的决策（或选择）机制以及群体行为的基本架构却无本质的改变。（笔者强力推荐《管理行为》第四版的中译本（詹正茂译）， 由机械工业出版社 2004年出版。该书言简意赅，切中要旨，是一本极为难得的好书。）

　　西蒙的深邃理解和透彻剖析引导他得出不少基础创新的结论， 和主流学派为了简化分析的需要而提出的牵强假设大异其趣，产生龃龉甚至冲突。这也引致了不少质疑，使他和主流经济学派渐行渐远。虽然在早期，西蒙的理论多 半建立在他个人的天才卓识之上，没经过太多严格的科学试验证明。但在1950年代后，管理的实践和行为科学的实验逐步证实了，西蒙非凡的洞察力是符合实际 和领先群伦的。 西蒙在1957年出版的“人、社会和理性模式“一书， 连同他用生物实验方法揭示出来，人和小白鼠一样， 他们追求自身利益的理性都是有限度的。西蒙令人信服地证明，和纯逻辑推导的结果相异， 人类的自利追求并非无止境的全局最大化（global rationality），而是止于适度的满足， 这种 “有限度理性”（bounded rationality）的诠释对经济学 的“理性人”基本公理假设构成了严重的挑战。 西蒙对统计和计量学科的理论研究导致他倡导非对称分布函数（俗称Zipf分布）来替代费雪的正态分布。这也说明了西蒙相信人类的行为倾向性强烈， 他们所追求、向往的和所畏惧、回避的原本就是非常地不对称。比起正态分布所暗指的“过犹不及”，把过分的赢利和过度的亏损都处理为风险，是人们共所趋避的 假设，更要切合实际。

　　西蒙戏称他幸好没有沦为全职的经济学家。事实上，他那广泛的兴趣和深厚的人文关切也不允许他仅仅停留在经济学的理论研究。西蒙浩瀚的智慧又使他得以游刃有余，开拓出多种领域。
当 之无愧的，西蒙是人工智能和数学定理计算机证明的奠基者之一。他和阿伦.纽伟尔合作的一系列开创性的研究成果改变了我们对人脑和电脑的关系的理解。纽伟尔 原是卡内基.梅隆大学的博士班学生, 但读了没多久,学院里所有的教授反而都会赶去聆听纽伟尔的报告会，以便更新自己的知识结构。 西蒙是纽伟尔的博士导师，但两人介入师友之间, 从五十年代中期就开始合作，用电子计算机来证明罗素和怀特海的名著“数学原理”中的一些逻辑命题。当西蒙向罗素函告他们的研究成果时，他不无得意地指出 “智慧和博学并不总是一回事”，并称计算机的智慧是如此的卓越,以至还得瞒着不让学童知道,以免孩子们会失去信心不肯再去费心去学习加减乘除! 西蒙对机器智慧的信心和期待同他对人类理性的质疑和保留成了有趣的对照。他对人工智能过分乐观的预言, 即六十年代后计算机可望赛过人脑, 至今未能兑现。现在学界已倾向于相信， 计算机将会被证明永远无法替代人脑, 尤其是后者的想象力。

　　西蒙的研究轶事，在他的自传（Models of My Life, 1996）中有不少描写，已有中文译本（ 《我生活的种种模式》 （曹南薇等译），1998年东方出版中心出版）， 笔者就不再赘述了，这里仅略谈个人的一些感受。

　　西蒙对中国人一向友好，紧跟着尼克松，他早在1972年即已访华。所以七十年代末开放伊始， 我念硕士课程时，就得以接触到他的一些研究。我当时的感觉十分明显，西蒙的文章，你只消读上第一、二页，就知道是出自大师手笔，就像听了帕瓦罗蒂的第一句 歌声一样。而他的通达，也是直扣人心弦的，我深深地为他所折服，常思他日若能及门聆教能有多好。所幸的是，我的博士导师之一 比尔.库柏教授是他的终身挚友和诤友。 库柏教授也是一位极其富有创造力和个人风采的大师级人物。西蒙在自传里通篇谈到比尔， 并辟有一章专门讨论他和比尔的交谊。 库柏曾任卡内基.梅隆大学的管理学院院长多年，事实上正是他将西蒙引荐到该校的。事实上，西蒙和他太太也是经库柏介绍才结识的。

　　1989年卡内基.梅隆大学有一座大楼以库柏命名，我出差去匹兹堡时，受库柏师之命去拜望西蒙， 同时也邀请他为中国留美经济学会的年会作演讲。当时我担任学会的会长，而西蒙是学会的顾问。西蒙的谈话睿智亲切，使人有如沫春风的感受。我向他请益治学的 方法，记得他用了一些浅显的比喻来引导，道出人类认知的通病，类似人们在黑夜中遗失了东西，常会到有烛光的地方而不去丢失的地点去寻找。他又指出，通常学 者们建立的研究模型，想靠简化来加强理解要点，和把握丰富现实的关系，如同地图和地域的关系：地图的比例尺要是太大，譬如1：1千万，则众多具体细节必然 遭到忽略，无法据以找到准确的地址；然而要是地图的比例尺过小，比如1：5的话，则地图就会太大不便携带，从而也失去其指引的功能。西蒙的这两个比喻我常 在心里揣摩，渐渐也似有所领悟。经济学的模型（其他学科亦如是）对现实的诠释能力，若不能把握一个适当的“度”的话，难免滑入吊诡之境。人们不是常常受到 一些分析模型的困扰吗？囿于信息、条件、手段的限制，不得不简易化。然而正是模型的这些权宜而牵强的假设，致使模型建成后推导出来的解决方案，对于实际问 题的解决既无益又无补。因为这类“模型方法”，削足适履或削头适冠般地，已经把造成问题徵节的因素也一并舍象掉了！

　　我访问西蒙办公室的次晨， 正值圣诞节后，匹滋堡的气温骤降至零下二十几度，打破了数十年的记录。西蒙却如约前来，在我们的年会上作了热情洋溢的致辞，给了与会者难忘的经验。 他也将自己的二卷本论文集题赠给我，署名“司马贺”。除了“贺”字有些走样之外，中国字竟写得中规中矩。西蒙能讲一些中国话，我表示钦佩之后，他又随口讲 了几句日语。他横溢的智慧总是那样随时俯拾即可。

　　他的那套论文集我一直珍藏着，惭愧的是生性疏懒，几乎没从文集中再认真读过他的文章。 不过我倒是拜读了他晚年出版的 “基于经验的微观经济学”（“An Empirically-Based Microeconomics”, Cambridge University Press 1998）, 是他在意大利客座时三次演讲的汇集。西蒙以他的阅历和洞察力，厚积薄发地检讨了经济学不少有争议的方法论和价值论的问题。 他作为一个执着探索的学者和斗士，曾频频投入其中不少关键论战，读来脍炙人口。我深受该书的启发，也因此向读者推荐。我以为，对于其他学人，这本书价值也 应当非同小可。

孙涤 悼念西蒙老师于
北京， 2001年2月

（本文收入我的随笔集《别在市场里发呆》（上海人民出版社，2004年）；2009年三月重订于洛杉矶）